teaching overrated truths and facts

All I wanted to teach her, all the difference between us, the names of the streets, of the people, the relationships the tricks of the trade, the different accents, what I thought I knew that she did not know but I wanted her to know, she taught herself all of this in the short interval between school and college. Thus demystifying the distances between us toward adulthood. The alleys between highways, the highways themselves, were just dwarfs to her, and monsters to me… she learned them all and found no magic in them. I had glorified that knowledge for no reason… way way overrated truths.. I need to rethink everything now

a reservoir of metaphors

I want to read about music again.. I need to enrich my metaphor reservoir. Lately my language seems to be missing a musical extension. I know that if I go back to playing music my word collection will be happier and my senses will gain a higher octave; my breathing chambers will digress onto a larger angle of some foreign unit, and I will have a richer collection of tools which will entail newer and more fun comparisons, similes and metaphors. I will create a new half season, half note, visible to me alone for a start. My narrative will suddenly get richer… and my canvas of words plusher.

outlived by a button collection

This button drawer will outlive me. When I was uncluttering my art drawers with collected whimsical unconnected objects, I contemplated these buttons that have been untouched for a while and that I have had since forever. It dawned on me that when I die they would probably remain, and I will be known as the woman who was outlived by her collection of buttons, tassels, threads, lace and paints. I need to write on the back of those elements a formula for a peaceful and graceful self exodus; I want to invent an auto execution formula, some chemical composition, a wako-style self shredder.. I don’t want my objects to burden others.. They were significant to me only.. I want them to self shred in silence..

preschool equality

In preschool they were all similar in everything. Only the tune of their screams differed… Someone was diagnosed with slow development for carrying his pencil in a hysterical squeeze with 3 fingers… instead of 4… or 2 instead of 3 according to the handbook of pen holding… That person’s mom read hysterically about sensory motor problems for the first time. Another kid got pulled out of the morning circle time. Later he got assigned a shadow (teacher) to sit with him. Before KG1 a quiet girl was pulled out of school into a special school. Some kids opted for special subjects too early on. In grade 1, students joined from a different school: we learned later that their parents had cheated the system by squeezing their kid prematurely in nursery at a different “institution” that accepts 2 years olds and bit. They must have been in a rush for something, racing with fleeting time. Some kids were taken out of class for special treatment, some were lost and had to take medication for some acronym disease. The rest were labeled safe, without calling them as such… Soon after that, some kids were considered to be inclined for literacy and numbers!.. That was when I learned fancy terms on a daily basis from some special education expert, barely out of college and into the jungle, lecturing at us during coffee hours.  Some kids were advised to sing.. to join the music band… but later just before performance time got placed in the back…

In middle school they had an option to take advanced classes. I spotted a boy writing in hiding.. He did not want his writings to be judged, nor for his hobby to be considered a talent with a name attached. I hope he keeps on writing in hiding. His notebook had no labels. No lines: just plain writing in a plain notebook. Then suddenly the dissimilarities became more Indiscrete. The school wanted to boast about ranking; getting acceptance into brand colleges became the biggest of all deals. Sports were played not for the fun of it… but rather as a passport to big branded institutions; so was community service were executed for different value than the one it is claiming to be… All got so messed up and fluid. What a tragedy…

Everything was predestined, since preschool.

sensation check

You know how when your tooth hurts, for instance, how you keep passing your tongue over it? Sort of to make sure it still hurts?

This is not masochism but rather a confirmation that my sensations are still operating. Are you trying to check for improvement? Similarly, with ageing: I tend to want to check that my knee still hurts… that arthritis is still there.. that my eye sight is still like yesterday… That I still need those glasses. That I still require those 30 seconds to pull myself off of my chair… that I am still alive and… not getting any younger..

maturing into a good old age

Old age is when your neck hurts because you had to elevate the pillow in order to breathe better.

Also old age is when you become the spectator, instead of the player, you slide into this new role without noticing. You get asked to give workshops about how to play instead of playing, and you design the awards instead of taking them. It is sad very sad. I want to bike, not just lecture people on the benefits of cycling..

Also maturing is when you can abstain from answering, although you know you can win the argument effortlessly, but abstention sounds wiser and more appropriate… for your age.

siesta makes us equal

Now I know why some people would love for the war to come back. This way the less successful ones feel in solidarity with the more successful ones, those who made it in life.

Slow achievers have this same feeling in the afternoon when the rest of the world comes back from work for a siesta. This is when everyone looks equal, whether they have struggled during the day or not. In times of war and draught, same thing

porcelain characters

I am sure that one of my characters in the novel that will eventually happen will sit on that chair some afternoon and sip coffee in the little alleyway in the 3D frame that my dad had purchased during one of his excursions to a remote Scandinavian country in the sixties and seventies.  In those places I have a feeling he considered himself to be free, away from anyone who knew him at home; he could redefine himself away from people around him who bombarded him with excess love and affection and paralyzed him with worry. That frame was so special to us.. my mom planted it in the living room in our mountain house… I used to stare at it and imagine how happy those porcelain characters were. It depicted two old people on a protruded 3D bench in a relaxed town, surrounded by sheep and trees and houses. My imagination would go back and forth, lamenting between episodes of time and space.. I wondered why they looked so different.. … I knew my main character in my novel-to-be will eventually pass through that village and ask them that question, and have some tea with them.. 

running after a memory

Trying to recapture the taste I had in mind upon seeing what I am seeing now. How I used to love the taste as it appears in the photo album. It seems I had tried to freeze the feeling and the taste up until this moment, this long awaited rendezvous. Until now it had been up to me to imagine its smell and aroma and taste, just by looking at the photo. But now that I am really faced with it after a long time, I see my brain running after memories, trying to align sensations and memories… I am numbed. I want to relive it and struggle to get a glimpse of it. The passing of the years has disabled the enzyme that allowed it into my bloodstream. No point in lamenting.. I will leave it in a memory state.. so paralyzed I feel.

school dismissal

You know how you when you were a kid at school like two hours before release time, (funny they call it release, as if you will be released from retention, or jail); you start dreaming of going home to be free. When you dream of that moment, you don’t necessarily focus on what you will be doing there.. Just on BEING there, as in emancipation from an unknown state to a secure familiar dwelling. You just have an inner drive to be there safely; put on your comfortable PJ and be free to tune off. This same feeling I have now everyday, toward the afternoon, I yearn for an unknown security, a dwelling with a mom, an unconditional security provider that smells of lavender and simple cleanliness. When I get home now, I go deep into my room that I call my parlor. When I don’t find the smell, the safety I am yearning for, I simply fall asleep. Yearning for warmth and freedom and security and love. On my off days, I miss missing safety, and the day is just lost. That day does not count.

to-do-lists

Each morning with my coffee I work on two lists: one regular to-do- list, and in parallel I pick up the previous days’ unfinished list items and compose a “yet-to-do-list”. I sit down to analyze what is common among what had been neglected hoping to maybe write a poem about it. I romanticize at covering the reasons with poetic excuses and make of it a necklace, adding beads to the beat of the missing items. The rhythm that resonates from the skipped items makes up a tune to the tempo of some incompleteness configuration.. People listen to the melody and recognize it as their own, and secretly enjoy it, and collectively celebrate incompleteness and write songs and artsy compositions about it. A new in-between note never played before and a new color surface in celebration of this birth. I can spot a new shade of turquoise seeing the light; a fuzzy color is created in an ambiguous level toward a new completeness..

childhood fears

There is always this one spot I tend to overlook. With time, I forgot it even existed; and with more time it became invisible. I must have been avoiding one big black hole and I see myself spinning around it; this black hole had everything to do with my unfinished activities. It has to do with why I am scared so suddenly and why I freeze ahead of a big explosive revelation, and why I skip the ending and want to quickly wrap up and leave everything and announce my conclusion prematurely. One day I had the guts to examine it: I found a bag that contained all my childhood fears and that explained my lack of confidence in various domains. The black hole matured with me and changed shapes so I wouldn’t recognize it, like a mole on my thigh, adjusting itself to my changing skin tone. It was the closest to me, and acting like part of me, my ally. I had been praising it and telling it all my secrets.. In fact it was listening all the time to everything around me. It became ME. Sometimes this black hole gets larger than me. It interrupts me, edits my words, and moods, dictates with compassion my communications, gives its opinions and has a say in all my actions and transactions. Whenever I try to face my fears it acts like a warrior. But I know it was just acting, since fear is its primary ingredient. With time its composition became more complex: it turned into a mole by stealing my redundant nerves as thread with which to weave for itself a web in my inner core. It chooses happy color threads to cover its ugly constitution. Each faulted and weak argument I made was the result of its very making.. It was spiffing fear in my psyche and taming down any wave of high happiness; it was behind my sudden coolness right before a supposed explosion. I am not sure how we became friends. I thought it was saving me. Even now, it is typing some of these words with me, choosing safer diplomatic versions from the thesaurus of pain. It makes me feel safe. I am so sorry. It says better safe than explosive. When I try to resort to writing, it interjects metaphors not exactly stemming from a poetic edge as you may think, but rather a remix imposed on me by It.. It tames my similes, and curbs my metaphors while making sure I dance around the truth of what I want to say. There are two sheets of music one behind the other: one for the singer and one for the musician. It is Saturday for one, and Monday for the other. I will tell you all about this when she goes to sleep. In the meantime, treat all this just as another poem.

mature friendship

With maturity… You become less intimidated by big things.. Now, Riemann, Cauchy, Heine and Borel, Euclid and Weierstrass are my friends. I like to get into the string of thoughts that lead them to their giant ideas, and adopt them as mine.. from inside… I like to think that they are made of flesh like mine.. and that I am friends with them...

tender complicity

I miss so much living in that remote country where you wake up to the sound of rain in the morning. I miss the tune of the monotonous anchorman in the background, reciting the news in a reassuring confident voice, safe in the background accompanying me through my daily routine, with familiarity and complicity at once. I love the dark mornings and spotty glass, where it is totally unknown what is coming next: winter fall or spring or summer, it is always the same shade. How I wish I could replicate this mood with the tunes of electronics and greyness of the shades and curtains?

relative emotions

This morning I wondered how can one incident that happened to you and your siblings some 50 years ago get classified in their memory as a subject of happiness, and in yours as a subject of utmost sadness?

a chocolate chip poem

I was sifting through old photos from times when my kids liked colors, where the melodies on our walls were playful and happy notes resonated from the walls, I gathered words and syllables from those photos and sat down with a glass of milk to write a chocolate chip poem,,

old bed

This bed by the same window overlooking the then smaller tree some thirty five years ago is now holding a heavier body reading a novel: I used not to be as restless. I used to be able to finish a book and savor it with no interruptions. At that time I used to worry about finishing my novel too soon for fear of falling into vacuum before starting the next one. I was awaiting nothing.. letting things be,, I would take things face value not questioning what was for lunch. No need to set the alarm for anything. Now my glasses are reading glasses only.. much slimmer.. I am much heavier; I worry about falling, and try to wisely use the remaining cartilage in my knees. I look at the curtains. I had hemmed them patiently some thirty years ago. I have more love and admiration now for things and thoughts. I am afraid to see things finish. I have a constant urge to write about things, record them, classify them, freeze them, collect them in a bank of memories and emotions just in case I wanted to come back to them at a later stage, … I can no longer find things. I tried to tell my kids that during those long summers nothing specific was planned, nothing ever happened, we were left to just be… I was not sad, nor happy; I just was. I had no questions to answer, being an exemplary obedient follower on the outside. I looked for crafts to make, always from scratch, pre-PINTEREST era. That same bed is now cranking under my weight and age, lovingly asking me if I was OK. I watch my fingers. Just like before, my left thumbnail is remarkably smaller than my right thumbnail, a minor birth defect. The old vaccine mark on my left thigh is now well blended with my skin so much so that I can hardly notice it. I used to believe that everyone had one.. Dried out through the years, I am now de-moisturized all over, inside out. I miss having grandparents, I skipped missing parents, or will get there sometime.. I am still at the stage of missing their parents. Now I look at the floor tiles. I remember contemplating the unevenness in their patterns and wondering where it came from. I see it now.. Just as uneven as it used to be, as uneven as my nails. Now I feel more liberated from unevenness, I went beyond those distinctions, I am unfreezing myself, and I have more love for things. My imagination has developed some kind of Parkinson’s, or epilepsy, on the way to death or maybe emancipation.

20 moods later

If you were to watch a movie again, 20 moods later, would you sympathize with the same character? How about identifying with the same character you identified with so many gaps ago? Will you be less judgmental or compassionate? Or neutral? Or inconsistent?

Sometimes a certain scene pops into your memory and you start reminiscing about a long time gone, when you were younger and more desired… , just to realize a bit later that it was just a scene from a movie or from a book.. that you never actually lived… but with which you must have identified so completely

for the love of embroidery

A special vintage piece of embroidery landed in my studio after a lengthy journey.

From its smell and touch I could swear I knew where it was born.

It must have started in the hands of secret underground embroiders. The story goes that on one Saturday afternoon in October, colored silk thread and linen showed up in a modest alley that separates embroiderers’ domiciles in a remote village. That first visit was completed in total secrecy. Husbands were away and no one noticed this suspicious business rendezvous, the first in a series. Those conspiring future workers lined up to receive the “material”; they were nervous like a woman would receive her furtive lover. They had been promised to receive requests and supplementary material on the first Saturday of each month in case their work was approved.

A yellow SUV delivered a big burlap bag with the thread and fabric and audio taped instructions describing the stitches. Before this visit, on normal afternoons, the middle-aged ordinary housewives would gather after a long day of tedious housework on each other’s terrasses, dressed in their afternoon colorful robes to share stories and harmless gossip over coffee and tea. Little did they know that this routine was about to change. From that day and on, their gatherings took place in the same place, but for a different purpose: to furtively and patiently embroider while updating each other on the latest episodes of some Egyptian or Turkish series. They executed their work with suffocated enchantment. Soon enough some started wearing reading glasses, while others concocted new blends of nameless herbal teas mostly grown on their balconies; some created alternatives for ottomans where to rest their tired feet while crossing those fine and precise colored stitches. They rotated those secret gatherings in each others’ dwellings, making sure to reveal their work to no one, except for the safe village minors. Very soon the invisible “dealer” applauded their work and started sending requests and materials twice a month: more silk and thread and cotton and instructions on tapes were regularly welcome. They learned that their magical work made it to dresses and shawls. They were sent a few photos by young relatives living abroad of their work exhibited in exotic shows, and in the “textile museums” in very modern cities. Photos of women working on those projects on their modest terraces in colorful dresses and slippers were made into small icons and tagged on the back of the items’ linings, some hidden statement that claimed to empower underpaid women in some exotic fashion?

So it happens that on one Saturday afternoon, to my own enchantment and amusement, I received a large bag of fabric scraps from a friend of mine who was in a mission from her therapist to unclutter her own studio: she had collected leftover materials from the closets of her deceased mother-in-law: beads, buttons, trimmings, tassels, fabric and lace. She knew I could make use of these charming ornaments to complement my patchwork projects. As soon as I opened the bag, a piece of an old cushion revealed itself and stood out in a statement. I could swear it smiled at me. It was pretty torn, and its corners were worn own from spending long years in her mother-in-law’s noble salon. It occurred to me that I had seen similar cushions in many living rooms at different “ageing” stages. I gently held that piece in my hand. My favorite turquoise dominated the composition. Such cushions resonate of intensive labor: repetitive recursive iterations, row after row, some more monotonous than others. I observed the embroidery’s patterns and heard the encrypted melody of some afternoon uniform existence. A calming thoughtless mantra of stitches and women assembling in solidarity sealed a long day’s hard work.

Such embroidered cushions formed an ideal wedding gift specially if the newlyweds were moving abroad… I took that fragment carefully into my hands, with the care of a doctor treating the wounds of a loved one. I planned to harmlessly trim away the exhausted corners without altering its character. As soon as my finest scissors laid their blades on its surface in order to perform the gentle incision, a cloud of letter-like dust started hovering in my studio. I smiled to the fragrance of herbal teas emanating from the ripped stitches; I heard the snitchers’ laughter; if I concentrated, I would get a glimpse of that yellow SUV as it rolled its wheels into the alley; I could smell the jasmine on the terrace. I held my breath long enough to witness the seasons rolling into those lengthy days on the terrace. Then in the winter parlors of those beautiful, secretly joyful embroiderers; not to mention the scent of onions in their hair, mixed with the “Baladi” soap… All those and more sparkled across my studio, like cheerful glittery material whispering a tale once told and never lived. I followed the dust with the corner of my eyes with the watchfulness of a butterfly collector attempting to preserve the last remains of a fluttered wing belonging to some discontinued butterfly species of the Amazon.

encapsulation of joy

You know when you have spent your life trying to describe a certain feeling, then you give up after drafts and pages.. then you hear on the radio one word that captivates the sensation you have been trying to encapsulate.. one word in the lyrics of a passing song on a mysterious channel? This is what I felt when I discovered turquoise and gold… they capture my feeling and make my brush hyperventilate with joy.