Day 32: Leila Chatti, Gabriel Marcia Marquez, Esme Weijan Wang
Ayee, it has been hard to update this blog due to putting my time into editing a music magazine and working on a large-scale map.
Poem: Leila Chatti - Goatsong
I will survive the wrong
I’ve done. All the love
that didn’t serve me.
My youth used up
worshiping mercurial
myopics. I’ve cried a lot
very briefly. This sorrow has helped
make my career. Yes,
I’m a difficult person
to endure, I hardly manage.
Oh hum, the rest of my life
keeps coming. It feels just
like I knew it would.
This poem felt very real to me, having thought all these thoughts again and again within the last year. I think poems of lament are useful and even beautiful.
I think what I like about truthful poems is they articulate my worries into art.
Said Alexander Pope:
"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;"
Story: Gabriel Garcia Marquez - The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
A very krazy story that stretches the limits of the term "magical realism", being not so much a real setting with magic sprinkles in, but a story entirely bizarre from the very first sentence.
In the story, a decrepit old angel washes up on a beach and is kept as a prisoner in a the family's chicken coop.
The community acts as you'd expect stupid crowds of people to act- they come far and wide to gawk at the angel, throwing rocks to make it move, asking it to perform miracles, to which the angel only provides sadistic curses. The community soon loses interest and moves on to the next spectacle.
We have seen this plot many times - theres even a Simpsons episode about it, but its Marquez's small details that make this story truly otherworldly and imaginative.
The realism I suppose comes from the world's reaction to the fantasy. In a way, the people's reactions to the arrival of the angel are similar to the reactions to any new novelty- most recently, AI.
I would need to reread this to get more out of it, but I really like Marquez's imagination.
Essay: Esmé Weijan Wang - Collected Schizophrenias Chapter One.
I decided Huizinga's Homo Luden held very too little interest to me, so I have changed to this book of essays on stigmatised mental illnesses.
The first chapter "Diagnosis" is precisely about the mechanisms of diagnosing Schizophrenia, which are always shifting. It is a bit too technical for my layman interest, but Wang is skilled in tying the information together.
Humans are the arbiters of which diagnoses are given to other humans—who are, in most cases, suffering, and at the mercy of doctors whose diagnostic decisions hold great power. Giving someone a diagnosis of schizophrenia will impact how they see themselves. It will change how they interact with friends and family. The diagnosis will affect how they are seen by the medical community, the legal system, the Transportation Security Administration, and so on.
Its true. A diagnosis or misdiagnosis seems to change the whole fabric of one's inner and outer worlds.
The chapter ends in a really intriguing and unusual way:
In these investigations of why and how, I am hoping to uncover an origin story. Pan Gu the giant slept in an egg-shaped cloud; once released, he formed the world with his blood, bones, and flesh. God said, “Let there be light.” Ymir was fed by a cow who came from ice. Because How did this come to be? is another way of asking, Why did this happen?, which is another way of asking, What do I do now? But what on earth do I do now?